Article January 2, 1954 Issue

THE PERFECT MODEL

MARGUERITE EMILY BUTTNER

What is the remedy for an apparently limited life? How can perfection, and freedom from sickness, sin, and fear, be attained?

Mary Baker Eddy answers these questions when she compares mankind to a sculptor looking at his model in order to mold the perfect form. "What is the model before mortal mind?" she asks in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 248). "Is it imperfection, joy, sorrow, sin, suffering? Have you accepted the mortal model?'" She adds: "The world is holding it before your gaze continually. The result is that you are liable to follow those lower patterns, limit your life-work, and adopt into your experience the angular outline and deformity of matter models." Then she admonishes, "We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives."

When thought becomes permeated with the true concept of being—the perfection of God and His reflection, man—this concept begins to take shape in human experience. Christian Scientists work from the standpoint of the perfect model, and their lives become increasingly harmonious and complete as the truth of the perfect concept begins to replace the image of inharmony and limitation. In that vital Bible passage which our beloved Leader considered important enough to be read from the desk at Christian Science church services every Sunday the Apostle John says (I John 3:2), "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." When God shall appear to us through His Christ, then we shall be able to demonstrate our true status as children of God.

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